Brady is a four-time Emerging Playwright Award winner with San Francisco Bay Area-based PlayGround, where she is a resident playwright. PlayGround has staged dozens of Brady's short plays, fully producing four of them in their annual Best Of PlayGround Festival. They have commissioned three of her full-length plays, Feets Too Big, Mushroom Boy and The Sum of All Parts. Brady was also commissioned by the Marin Theatre Company's Youth Conservatory to write the full-length musical melodrama, Lickety Split (music and lyrics by Jef Labes.) Her short play, Dear Douchebag, was a 2011 Heideman Award finalist, and her play, Sewermonster Diaries, was adapated for radio by KQED's Writers' Block.
With her background in physical theatre and clowning, Brady's plays feature inventive characters (for example: a sewermonster, a turkey sandwich and several severed body parts) and strong comedic parts for women. As a playwright, Brady loves collaboration and working in an ensemble, and her plays offer opportunities for a wide variety of performing genres including puppetry, clowning and dance. Brady has also written sketch comedy for Fogtown Network, Killing My Lobster and her own comedy trio, The Kloons.
Selected Full-Length Works:
Mushroom Boy
Katherine is pre-middle-aged and mildly depressed, but determined to shake her funk by cooking organic produce from local farmer's markets three times a week. Or is it her unnatural obsession with a steamy young mushroom vendor? She keeps buying produce she never cooks as she develops a fantasy life with this young man. Meanwhile, her uneaten produce is berating her, and her best friend is a turkey sandwich (with avocado and bacon). What happens when fantasy becomes reality? And what if your parsnip really does hate you?
Originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround, based on the short play by the same title.
Feets Too Big
Suzy fancies herself a grown-up these days. She has a grown-up house and cooks grown-up dinners for her grown-up friends (VPs and CEOs), but when she loses her grown-up job in a crap economy, she is torn: Should she go back to her old career with her old partners? One of them is her ex, and the other barely grew up. Oh, and they're all clowns. As her worlds collide, she strives to answer the questions: Can you be a yuppie clown? Circus nuttiness and stick puppets combine to form Suzy's mid-life identity crisis.
Originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround.
The Sum Of All Parts (The Dismemberment Play)
Three childhood best friends reunite in the small town they grew up in. As teenagers, they got wild in that small-town way, partying, causing trouble and vowing to leave their crappy little town. Twenty-something years later, only one has managed to get out, and even he is tormented by the trauma that haunts them all: In a teenaged game of truth or dare, the three accidentally blew up a house they all thought was abandoned. It wasn't. And they each live with constant reminders of its mysterious occupant. Characters include the former teens and the disembodied limbs that haunt them.
Originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround.
Lickety Split (music and lyrics by Jef Labes)
At the family-run Candypants Candy Company, business is slow, but their gifted candy technologist invents something that will change the way we choose candy forever, revitalize the business and win the heart his true love. Until—a band of spammers, telemarketers and traffickers in personal information steal this Tongue Reading Technology, and use the candy consumers' personal information for marketing. In classic melodrama style, the information-harvesting spies and the benevolent candy-makers face off. This musical appeals to children and adults and is designed to have a student cast that varies in size from 12-40.
Originally commissioned by the Marin Theatre Company Youth Conservatory
Selected short works:
Sewermonster Diaries (15 minutes)
(KQED)
In Sewermonster Diaries, playwright Brady Lea creates a comic portrait of a woman who withdraws from society and descends into the sewer. Pursued by the police, demonized by the media and her former neighbors, can she ever return to her life up there?
Originally developed and produced by PlayGround
La Pharmacie (5 Minutes)
A very short play in which our heroine struggles with both a yeast infection and a foreign language. Probably not based on a true story. The playwright requests you not ask. (Download PDF)
Mushroom Boy (12 minutes)
The short play on which the full-length play was based, inspired by Brady's weekly trips to San Francisco Farmers Markets, and the excessively flirty mushroom vendor who used to make eyes at her. And probably everybody else.
Originally developed and produced by PlayGround. (Download PDF)
